{This is the part of the recipe where they go on and on about the fall weather in southern Connecticut and how hard it is to find a meal that everyone in the family likes, so if you want to skip straight to the ingredients list aka my dev checkpoints & code, check out the checkpoints section}

Intro

I recently heard a saying that "every good business starts with a good story ¹. Now, I have no idea if that's true, but recently, I've discovered that every good app/feature/project² starts with a mascot and it helps when they're cute. Before you start questioning my sanity, about 2 years ago at my current company, my team was about to embark on a really cool but really long and intensive project. One of our pieces of core business functionality was due for a MAJOR upgrade. Technology wise, we're talking ancient. PHP monolith with thousands of lines of untested jQuery, and the feature used a 7 year old sphinx search engine that rarely returned the correct results. It was losing us a lot of money every month and the business was, let's say, very eager for a quick solution.

But, we engineers aren't in the business of "quick and dirty", we're usually in the business of "building cool shit" and my team, stacked with all senior engineers are definitely in the business of "building the best cool shit"³. We wanted to move to a new stack on both sides but we knew it was going to be a long journey and tickets weren't going to fit into cute, nice little two-week sprints. We needed product buy-in, user buy-in⁴, in spite of the delays, I needed them to feel the incoming magic and there's nothing that does that like a cute animal. The feature I was building was a duplicate checker, and I, a child of the 90s, a quintessential millennial, immediately thought of my favorite Pokemon growing up, as well as my favorite phrase when I want to echo the same sentiment as someone else, Ditto.

Ditto took on a life of her⁵ own with countdown's to her release. Emoji's in slack. People asking for more features even before we released. Let's face it, it's hard to be mad that a feature is two weeks "late" when you see this face. You can't. It's impossible.

Ditto was a difficult but oh so fun project to build, and the extra time that I was afforded from the business⁶paid off. Ditto, isn't just an adorable mascot slapped on a comparable feature, she was shiny new and worked even better than what we had before. In one month, we were able to reduce refunds⁷ from something like 3% down to 1.2%.

Ok so extremely long story short: if this thing is gonna work we need a guiding light, something to hold on to in our time of darkness and peril⁸, and once upon a time when I was young, dumb, and galavanting on sixth street with my friends, I had that. I had a fallback, a home base, a place of comfort, a place that wasn't seemingly extraordinary or special but we always had a good time and I could always recommend people stop there when they're on 6th for a pretty "typical downtown Austin bar", Chupacabra⁹. It was where we usually started the night and ended the night. Chupa was also that bar that could be randomly really fun on a rainy Wednesday night. Chupa was the standby¹⁰. Plus they have food, including tacos, and people visiting Austin always want tacos, so it's basically a perfect magical place. And it's namesake shall henceforth be the spirit animal for my Free Solo Hackathon©.

Now that we have a mascot, we can start the hack. I don't have a ton of time to be blogging my every random thought¹¹ and because of my sometimes crippling adhd, I procrastinated on starting this, so we gotta go to hyper speed for this bad boy.

Each "Part" will have a Checkpoints section. The checkpoint will be named after the objective I'm trying to accomplish. I'll write the checkpoint name, go do some hacker stuff. Then every hour or so, I'll post how that objective went, any insightful thoughts or pivots, how I'm feeling, what I'm listening to, etc.

Okie dokie, may the odds be ever in our favor I guess.

Part 2 - Checkpoints

1. // Todo: UX for PWA. Make logo, get colors, wireframes, general user flows:

• I always underestimate how long it takes me to do this part. This is actually my favorite part, for me, putting a usable interface together that solves user problems is where the magic actually happens. Contrary to popular belief, this is where software is developed, not the IDE.

I decided to go with a chat-like interface, I really want to take advantages of all of the native features and offline support that PWAs have. I want this to feel like a text app with clippy google assistant?¹². I also let my example user, Dani¹³, "guide" the features and feedback design. Dani is most likely going to be accessing this on her phone and may need to reference the information at a later time. She needs to quickly find a place to go, I don't want to overwhelm her with a lot of choices. I want to direct her through the flow so I can give her a recommendation, but allow her to explore or "take shortcuts" where she needs. I want this to feel like she's texting me, not like she's talking to an impersonal chat service. In the interest of time and because I am both the UX designer and developer, I decided to axe the "every user flow needs a wireframe requirement". I put the general user flows on the wireframes. Pumped with how it's coming together. I think I have a good idea of the stack I'm going with, but that's a secret I'll never tell.

xoxo, Gossip Girl

P.S - Next up is the data analysis and my first draft for the mvp endpoints. Then I'll move on to getting the front up, then go back to the back to work on schema and adjust any endpoints.

2. // Todo: Data structure proposal and mvp endpoints:

Footnotes

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1. Idk who actually said that quote but I do know that Paul Holdengraber once said that every story is either the "Iliad or the Odyssey", just to be clear this solo hack is absolutely the latter.
2. And by "good" I mean a feature that adds intrinsic (increases revenue for us or adds to the developer experience/joy) or extrinsic (increases user joy) value to the application.
3. Not to brag but we've won a decent number of Hackathons as a team, so like it's not just an opinion.
4. Our users are internal so if we make a product that our coworkers hate, or worse can't do their job thus lose out on money, they know exactly who to dm in slack to complain....
5. Like a graceful commanding ship, I think of all the apps I write as female 🤷‍♀️
6. It was one of those epics that are filled with tickets that just seem to drag on. I'd have days, if not weeks, of nothing working. A couple times I evened questioned my sanity with my manager Tommy. There was no stackoverflow to rescue me, I was often on the 30th page of Google, combing through obscure repos looking for clues. It was a god damn slog.
7. Refunds were at an all time high and the users were becoming frustrated. It was greatly impacting revenue.
8. If you think I'm being dramatic, I dare you to build a full stack application by yourself in 4 days. If there aren't tears, you're not trying hard enough...
9. Chupa is still open by the way and the bartenders and servers have always been the absolute best. If you're in Austin, stop by, say hi and tip a ton (I have 0 affiliation with the bar btw, just long time/first time).
10. I don't really know how I should corroborate this statement but if you ask anyone that was 19-30 during the "golden age of six street" (what I define as being 08~16) they would tell you that they frequented Chupa. They also have giant margaritas that require 3 additional people to help drink. Other acceptable answers: 2019West, Kung Fu for $1 mimosas on Sunday, Iron Cactus.
11. Don't worry I have so many. So so so so so many.
12. Words are starting not to make sense. I broke so much stuff at work today, just nasty type and build errors. Everything is a slog right now, but it was so much fun to design the UI for Chupa.
13. One of my best friends Danielle, who is a champion at all things planning, traveling, and being a casual genius. The user story and scene set up are in the wireframes.

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